Rabbit
by electric caterpillar
Summary: a foundling found in the foreground of the gerudo campaign against hyrule in a realistic reimagining of the ocarina of time. rated m for historically accurate violence and sexual violence
1. Chapter 1

a/n: this was written because i despair of ever finding my very favorite zelda fanfic, which it closely resembles (.u_u)

it was hosted on an independent fansite archive a long time ago, probably six or seven years ago, at least. in it shiro fosters link and takes him to hyrule market town, where he enters an archery competition. ganondorf sees him participate, becomes obsessed with him and abducts him. if any one knows of somewhere it still exists, would you please direct me to it? thank you! sorry for the psa!

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The orphan in green rags stood in the wood, sunflower-blond curls, red peony cheeks speckled with freckles, a little disheveled cap like an elf's with a wound of inept stitches up its seam, camouflaged by his colors and his demeanor, and looked up at Shiro open-eyed, mouth agape.

Shiro did not know it, but he mirrored that mask of childish astonishment beneath the iron hood of his helmet.

Shiro knew of the woods. Every child was told tales of the horrors and wonders which inhabited the southern wilderness, leviathan bipedal boars, dancing bones, talking trees, maiden-shaped fae.

He had visited before, infrequently, being training for the infantry, learning essential survival and woodland tactics. Even from the cover of his comradery he had then correctly surmised it to be a desolate place, as temple is desolate, its riotous viridity and liquid brightness concealing things twinkling just beyond the fabric of earthly sensation, whispering with secrets as old as the earth.

Of everything he expected to encounter here, on the moss-eaten and mushroom-spotted wood plank bridge erected over the dusty gully at the mouth of that impregnable and ancient forest, isolated from his iron life amongst the smoke and noise of the market town by the shocking stillness and pagan fragrance and sheer immensity of drifting light and quiet, spirits or young gods or cosmic eggs, he could not have expected this.

"Child," Shiro began, his voice softly rustling and dry as autumn leaves, and he found he had to pause and swallow. He feared the wild boy would bolt like a colt, but he did not. He seemed rooted to the spot with surprise.

Shiro grasped aimlessly in the suffocating quiet for words with which to coax the child and found himself, unspeaking, kneeling. He unlatched the leather strap of his helmet, holstered it under his arm, and put out his hand.

With timid tiny steps like a fawn learning to walk, the orphan drew a little closer to him, just a little.

"Come," Shiro urged, and it was a sound of a quality he could not recall himself making before, kinder and more adult than his voice had ever sounded. "Come, child. I will not harm you."

He did. How extremely small he was. How dirty, the rotund peaches of his cheeks, smudged with whorls of oily soil, the innumerable nicks in his misshapen grasshopper-green garments. His eyelashes were tawny strokes of wheat against his spotted brown cheeks.

Shiro drew off his mail gauntlet and depressed the child's cheek gently with his thumb. Without a cloth, he could only brush the earth back and forth. He had half expected the orphan to wince, to alight with a crow-cry to the sanctuary of the trees, but he did not. The orphan looked at him insatiably, as if he had never lain eyes upon another human person before.

"From where do you come?" Shiro asked, in his strange new warm and sun-gold tone.

The orphan did not answer. He looked Shiro brazenly in the eye, and Shiro found his look the ethereal medium between sea and sky.

Very slowly, very carefully, the orphan put up his small pink-knuckled hand and with soil-dark fingers mirrored Shiro's touch on Shiro's sudden jaw and clean black grizzle.

Shiro smiled.

Slowly, the orphan smiled also.


	2. Chapter 2

The child's name Shiro could not determine, nor his age, nor anything of his origin. The waif was in fact utterly dumb. He could not speak a word.

But Shiro saw that he liked apples, red or yellow or green, and the bottle of tepid milk he offered from his provisions. He owned an elf-sized tin sword in a shabby scabbard strapped across his back he could throw around with a little skill. He liked to pause and squat and examine closely the wildflowers spilled along the wayside and the insects humming in the summer. He would sometimes hop with pleasure like a little goat as they walked, and when Shiro offered his hand to him, he put his into it without hesitation, and offered in return his little seashell-pink and sepia smile which burgeoned certain and sure on him as a short-lived morning blossom opens in the new days dew.

Oh, and when the vast violet dark descended over them, and by the ruddy twilight Shiro caught and killed and cooked over their fire a field hen and fed the child its sticky crisp skin and soft white yielding flesh, the child sat himself on Shiro's folded knees and kissed him tenderly with gratitude.

And Shiro, putting his cloak over the huddled young form drowsing in the throbbing hot firelight with one little fist loosely clasped on the first and center fingers of Shiro's left hand, nursed a tenderness very strange to him, creeping up his stomach as ivy climbs an impenetrable tower.

One hundred years ago, fifty years ago, ten years ago, Shiro could have been the one that orphaned him. Shiro could have been called upon to put his sword into the very tumbling rotund trunk and tender tummy cuddled in his shadow.

In truth, Shiro knew he was kind and cowardly. He could patrol, he could report, he could shake his sword and show his teeth, but he knew he was not a soldier, though he wore the skin of one. He assured himself he could not have hurt a child in any context, could not be tempered in the fires of war, as was his father when he campaigned against the menace from the western desert.

Even so, Shiro resisted feeling a little self-indulgent, a little like a hypocrite, watching that sweet child he fed and sheltered wearing armor crafted for and by the blood of someone's sons.

In his secret green dreams, the orphan murmured, turned his cheek on his plump halved armlet, and sighed.

Shiro touched the nacreous back of his perfect little ear which slipped from the hem of the ragged cap.

When they arrived at the market town, Shiro thought affectionately, he must take the child to be fitted for proper clothes. What a ridiculous garment he wore, a formless sheet as green as raw tea. It might have been a scrap of the blanket he was abandoned in.

Poor mite, poor, poor boy. Shiro passed his hand over the tawny curls, the down at the nape of the naked neck.

And what then?, spake Shiro's father's voice, and what would Shiro do with an uncivilized whelp? Keep him in his barren issue barrack apartment like a dog while he patroled? Carry him strapped to his back in the field, on reconnaissance in the hostile desert wasteland like a refugee widow?

The war may have been officially over, but Shiro in his profession was not permitted to remain innocent to the fact that times of peace could not make of the world a safe place for the destitute, and especially children, and especially a young and lovely child that could not even cry out for his help.

Shiro did not allow himself to phrase the thought that it might be better of him, kinder of him, to put the child permanently to sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

The orphan was descended from a hunter, Shiro was very sure.

If Shiro had been a religious man, he would have been intrigued and disturbed at realizing the fact the child had wandered out of the wood which contained the special dwelling place of the green goddess, the great benefactor depicted wild with bow and tempest.

Shiro was not a religious man. He was young and cynical and merely impressed with the surprising adept power of his child's stout brown arms, his natural feel for the arch of the arrow.

The fifth arrow the orphan loosed on his own struck the apple standing on the trunk ten feet before him squarely in its scarlet heart with an audible squelch.

Shiro laughed aloud in surprise and pleasure at that, and the orphan, delighted with his delight, turned and leapt into his arms, adult-sized bow flapping in his hand like a paralyzed wing.

They were paltry hours from the walls of the castle market town, now, having passed beneath the firmament of four sage suns, but Shiro found himself meandering more and more, stopping to feed the orphan even when he would not be fed, and playing little games with him, tickling his ribs and plucking him up from the earth, dressing him in his heavy helmet and gauntlets, and as now, putting in his two tiny hands the tools of war to be transformed into toys.

In the skeletal limbs of a lonely tree, an immense owl watched them with inscrutable round black eyes.

Was it that ill omen that repelled Shiro from his destination, sheltering his child in distractions? If he could delay their arrival, delay the end of the dream, would the need for something to be done with the child evaporate upon waking?

Another day passed away from him. By the fireside the orphan dressed in his cloak sat on his knee and nibbled wild apples while Shiro calculated it had been a week and a day since Shiro had been set out on patrol, five days longer than he had been alloted.

The orphan, a frantically energetic boy, kept putting aside his meal and seeking out in Shiro's rucksack the glass milk bottle he had already licked clean of cream, holding it in both little hands, looking up at Shiro like a plaintive baby creature to its wet-nurse.

"We've none, child," Shiro would soothe, and his tone was understood if not the words, and the orphan would frown but capitulate the glass, and as if in apology offer his little fist full of eviscerated fruit shiny with juice to Shiro, but Shiro could not eat.

With his chin in his hand, Shiro considered him. What a simple, gentle duckling of a child the orphan was, hot by the merry crackling fire, snuggled in the fine fur lining of Shiro's garment which he spilled the syrup of apples over, head tipped, looking around and listening with intense interest to the brilliant spray of stars arranged around the opal bowl of the moon, the steps and murmurs of dark animals which loped enviously around the boundary of the good bright fire, the ravens and strange winged things which turned like clockwork over them in the glossy deep night.

How long had the orphan lived in that isolated wood? How had he lived? Who had fed him, sheltered him, given him love?

"What would you I do with you?" Shiro asked at last.

The orphan had eaten all the sweet white flesh of his apples to the black skeletons of pith and seed. Kitten-like, he was licking clean his plump small fingers and knobbly wrists. When he was spoken to, he put these in his lap in a strangely considerate gesture, and considered Shiro with his cheek dropping tawny curls on his slight shoulders.

"What would you I do with you?" Shiro repeated.

Inscrutable as the expression of a wild animal, that child's subtly green silent stare which fixed on Shiro for a long while, before the orphan scooted close to Shiro, very close, until their hips conflicted with each other, and finding his rest in the crook of Shiro's arm the orphan unfolded himself with a tiny sigh in the soldier's embrace.

That was no answer he could interpret, but Shiro thought he knew what must be done.

The next day before noon Shiro spied the beyond the hill the rippling red banners like tongues of flame, the tails of smoke ascending from freshly extinguished torches, the bare and imperious wall gray as the remains of a burned thing baldly addressing them.

Shiro, holding the astonished orphan's hand very tight in his, first brought him to market to buy him a bottle of milk and a slice of bread and yellow cheese, and then to the tailor to be fitted for proper clothing, and then to the office at the hem of the castle garden, the office of his grizzled sergeant who had also commanded his father, where to his astonishment Shiro perfunctionally resigned.

"What will you do?" the sergeant demanded of him. "What do you know of raising children? Shiro, son, this is folly."

It was folly, Shiro knew plainly, but he signed his resignation regardless, surrendered his sword and the plumed helmet which distinguished his lineage, and even through plated armor and stiff padded leather Shiro felt the orphan's warm plump arms closed around his hip, his subtle small cheek leaned in tedium in the junction of his waist.

"I have so few belongings," Shiro murmured to himself, putting down with a profound relief that shocked him his lead crown which he realized only know had been so heavy, "I shall depart the barracks by nightfall. We shall move into a room, for the time."

Very gently, the sergeant put out his hand and touched the orphan's flaxen hair.

"You need not leave," he said to Shiro.

"Excuse me, sir?"

"You need not leave the barracks, son."

The sergeant was old, the horrors of war deeply carved in his face in a language of approximate and brutal lines, but looking at Shiro, and then to the alien yellow-haired child Shiro now held in his hip, Shiro for the first time thought he could see his sergeant as a youth, as a child, who once nursed petty passions and cried in the dark for his mother.

"You need not leave," the sergeant repeated, and his voice sounded positively gentle, perhaps made for the distressed presence of the exerted child. "You need not leave straight away. This institution - this country - we are in debt to your family. Of course, you may keep your child for a time in our hospitality."

His child! Shiro was astonished to find his face a little hot, but it was cut with a grin of immensity and candor he had never before permitted in the presence of his commanding officer.

"Sir!" Shiro cried, shaking his sergeant's hand very hardily, and as words evaded him, again, "Sir!"

The sergeant found in his desk a little amber candy twisted up in wax paper and put it into the bewildered orphan's hands.

"Thank you, sir." Shiro spoke with suffering earnestness. He felt relieved of an inendurable conflict. He almost thought he could cry - overstimulated and overexerted, like the demurring child. "Thank you for the child - he is mute, sir, please excuse him. Sir, thank you!"

"Will you need money?"

The orphan had discovered the secret mechanism of the treat and liked it very much. In gratitude, and crudely imitating Shiro, he put out his rotund tawny hand and took in his bumbling fingers the sergeant's great mail forefinger to shake.

"No, sir," Shiro said, "thank you, sir. How can I thank you?"

"Take care of that child." The sergeant said simply. How very small the orphan's naked brown hand and voluptuous wrist appeared by his broad plated half-arachnid, too small, too unmarked, unnatural, elfin.

The sergeant released the orphan's hand and the little confection flipped in midair and closed around Shiro's waist, his face turned into the leather dressing of his stomach, almost fearfully, almost.

"Take care of that child."


	4. Chapter 4

It was a little while before the orphan could be coaxed out of the cool mute shelter of the barrack halls, into the riotous noise and activity like a furious wasp's nest that menaced him in the castle market streets. The shock of it had reduced him to stuttering tears several times the day they arrived.

No parsimony of time however inhibited his becoming a sort of mascot to the burly flotsam which moved through below and around Shiro's paltry rooms. Pedestrian young men in ugly dull plates starved for novelty by their arduous and ascetic profession Shiro found rapping at his door within the hour he toted home the dozing waif.

How extremely small that waif was! Shiro made a little bed for him with his rolled cloak, a spare sheet and a cupboard drawer with a broken bolt, and tucked the orphan gently down. A crust of salt and a ghost of wetness shone still in the corners of his long blond eyes, and Shiro very, very gently brushed it from him with a slip of ripped fabric he wet in his wash-basin; the child's speckled cheeks, his brow as smooth and round and brown as a nut, his slight throat and the subtle bones of his collar, the chubby rosehips of his flaccid hands barely curled together like two beached fishlings on his trundling tummy.

Shiro stood and watched him a little while, thinking fondly he would need a proper bath the moment he woke, in fact he needed a proper bath years ago, but finding nowhere in him the notion to disturb the child.

How hard the walk through town had been. Almost impossible. How hard for Shiro to hear him cry.

Shiro put another sheet over the boy, who was tucked in his cradle-cot immobile as to practically dead in the soft afternoon sunshine and breeze by the window hole, and then he shut himself in his own narrow barren sleeping-closet and for the first time he could consciously recall he crumpled tummy-down on the floor and cried.


	5. Chapter 5

Overwhelming was the world the orphan had been absconded to. How loud it was all the time, how colorful, what powerful smells and shocking novelties lived in it - people! There had been a time the child was only vaguely aware of his own form. Now human hands accosted him, touching his hair, his shoulders, his back, hoisting him from the very ground, and human voices hummed the percussion of the constant orchestra.

It was so busy here, so loud, he sometimes thought it was impossible he could live.

When he thought that, somehow, Shiro always saw.

The orphan did not know human tongue, he observed neither obligation nor law nor obeisance to seniority, he did not know he loved Shiro, but he loved Shiro.

Shiro who shooed out well-wishers and gogglers, Shiro who shut the blinds and covered his eyes, Shiro who rose early to walk to market to buy him a bottle of milk for breakfast, Shiro who labored in vein to teach him to bind his tunic and button his boots and speak his name, Shiro who washed him, Shiro who sang to him, Shiro who came to him in the dead of night bearing bleary eyes and a sputtering candle to soothe him when he dreamed of dragons.

One day, waiting for Shiro to return with cakes for tea, the orphan sat up in his cot at the window watching rooks circle in the sky.

He watched human children - which he was only vaguely aware he resembled - chasing each other around the street, shouting aloud, tossing about lovely colorful balls he coveted.

He watched as a little long-haired dog with a wagging tail was crushed beneath a wagon wheel, violet cords and white scaffolding erupting with a crack from the fine long fur. A rook like a lady dressed for mourning alighted on the cobble to dip its beak into the petunia of blood.

Rooks also roosted on the roofs of the barracks, sometimes on his own little window. They watched him suspiciously, how darkly black and bright the pinpricks of their eyes. Their looks made him very uncomfortable.

"I'm home," Shiro announced, bumping open the door with his hip, and in his haste to meet him the orphan overturned his cot and cup.

Shiro was not angry. Shiro never became angry at him. The orphan was wild and composed himself like he lived in a log in the wood still, but whatever ruin he wreaked Shiro would only laugh in his unobtrusive, gentle way.

He made that laugh now, putting the box of cakes on the kitchen table and holding the orphan on his hip he righted the child's elf-sized belongings with his foot.

Shiro sat the child in his little rough-hewn chair, filled his little cup with flower tea and inserted a sticky cake in his mouth.

The orphan obliged him, nibbling it, but he thought the cake felt a little sour in his mouth, a little hard. He wished Shiro held him still.

He thought of the ribbon of pink meat hooked in the rook's beak.

He thought of the Christmas-red bauble erupting in the air from the maidens hands.

He looked out the window.

"Would you like to go for a walk today?" Shiro asked.

For the three weeks and a day the orphan lived in the barrack hovel with the soldier Shiro every day the man had asked him, "would you like to go for a walk today?"

Today, the orphan put aside his cake and tea and put up his arms to be carried.


End file.
